About Grumpy

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I expect this not to be an issue for significant majority of the users but in goal of increasing performance & multi-server optimizations I am adding this feedback. Currently CCS fetches templates from the database on each page load despite any caching setup. I would suggest that if apc/xcache/etc which has local cache system, it should use them for templates as well on a very short timeouts. If the site is setup on multi servers, fetching ccs templates alone from the sql server can easily exceed 1gbps. And mysql will take up a lot of sockets writing to net.

This forum is bound to be biased... This is IPB forum afterall. But vB's getting trashed these days no matter which site you go to. For example, a recent thread in wht shows literally zero support for vb and people mentioning IPB/xenforo instead.

Comments made in these place isn't really like the forum. It makes more sense for the newest to be on top like youtube.
I suggest that there should be an option to have it ordered descending instead of current only option (for the lack there of) asc.

A license is valid forever. Purchase of one license will allow you to run your site forever.

An active license is required for additional features like spam protection and ability to upgrade (see bfarber's #2 above). A license is active for 6 months since purchase or renewal. During the span which your license is active, you can freely do upgrades.

Problem is partially the popularity. More people use it, more people will attempt to counter it. recaptcha is significantly used more than any other. It's no surprise they'll face the greatest counter force -- which itself is an issue. Yeah, I used keycaptcha before on wordpress. It's lot similar with ayah. But, my OCD makes finishing that take too much time. lol Must get perfectly right... Indeed. Every method will be defeated once the person who's trying to counter will customize to fight you. But I think that's where most bots draw the line. They're not going to make custom solutions for each sites.

And no, I'm not imagining that everyone will read the rules just because they can get the secret code from it. And it's not a method to ward off manual spammers that'll just skim the rules. Just bots. And it's always great to change it a little every so often so that they'll have to work if they want to spam.

Any type of blacklists, including IPS services, stopforumspam, etc. tend to be really poor if you have lot of asian users, especially Singapore and China, making the viability of them completely null. Singapore is an odd country when it comes to IP usage. Almost everyone from singapore comes through a proxy and so all their IPs look alike. That's why a blacklist will list them legitimately and then an innocent user gets screwed along with the spammer.

I personally hate recpachas very much. They're extremely hard to read, I'm pretty sure a bot reads it better than I do, and it wards off real registrations too.

Something like playthru (are you a human, (AYAH)) does seem a lot better. But perhaps due to being early stage of start up, they aren't very reliable in terms of availability/consistency. I quite often seen AYAH raising errors like unable to validate. But it's still one of the best.

One trick that I find to be almost always working, yet able to kill 2 birds with 1 stone is a Q&A saying paste in something from the rules page (and link the rules page, for the lazy). That way, they get to read the rules, answer is extremely trivial, and bots really don't seem to look in multiple pages.

The view count of any database items are set as medium int in mysql. That is, the maximum view count is 8388607 (even though size is set to 9). So, the view count is rather easily achieved for any big sites. I think this limit is far too low. And having the size defined as 9 shows intention of IPB devs that their intended limit was a billion, not a bit over a million. So, I think that should be fixed.

I previously raised a ticket (#810558) for this issue thinking that it was a critical bug in the design. However, I've been told that this was not a bug. So, I'm making a feedback instead to give my suggestion.

Problem: Steps #2 & #4 are extremely inefficient as they're writes and pointless.
With just few bits of coding, I altered this behavior on my version so that it skips steps 2 & 4. It works and it skips two writes per block. With multiple blocks, this is a huge huge save in performance.

Problem originates from the fact that it doesn't differentiate between absent cache and zero cache. That is, when a cache is non-existent when it should vs when a cache should not be set. It treats the both equally, generating and saving the cache each time then returning the value when it should have only generated it and returned it.

5. If you want to renew later, you can renew later. Simply while you have expired license status, you do not have access to the "premium" features. Such as IPB backed spam control, support, etc. Your forums will run fine. If you renew later, the premium features will be avl again and you will have access to updates.

6. Generally no. You shouldn't need to modify default hosting settings. Are you planning to use nexus? It requires ioncube. I don't know what IPB would ask Zend for... but I don't know everything about IPB. Just a user... But, if you want a piece of advice on a tangent of the main question... godaddy hosting really sucks. You should get it elsewhere... You'll thank me later. Wait, I guess you won't find out the nightmares if you don't stay. :P I've worked with many hosting companies as part of my profession.

8. You can have a post in the forums reposted as an article. :P And you can "follow" things (like subscribe) as well as keep up with "My Contents" that shows everywhere you posted. That should keep you on top of all your things. These features exist for all parts of IP suite.

I'm most probably nitpicking, but I quite dislike the default wordings in various areas of the forum.

For example, in avatar upload, it says: Recommend an image 200px or larger
Okay... who even allows 200+ larger avatars on their forums? I know it scales down but then I get people coming and saying... My avatar is huge, but it won't upload! It fails!!! And they try bigger and bigger.
/facepalm
Some say, my avatar is small after I upload! It recommended a large avatar!
/facepalm
It doesn't even display the actual forum maximum sizes. I'm actually quite clueless as to why it recommends big avatars.
I think it would make more sense to say: Large avatars are scaled down to a maximum size of: x and y.

And for things like signatures, it says: Your signature may contain:
• Any number images
• Images of any size
• Any number of URLs
• Any number of lines
I understand you can put limits and these are reflecting the limits. But under default settings, IPB will take its effort to outline that they can abuse the sig system. Rather, it almost sounds like they should abuse it. Despite my custom forum rules saying you shouldn't have huge signatures, people read that and they think it's fine. When signature is moderated, they come to complain asking why it was removed.
/facepalm
IPB could have simply said nothing ! I think it would be lot better to only list restrictions. Not their freedoms.

Some more, but generally, I hope who ever writes this takes more consideration into people who lack common sense. Make things less ambiguous.

2. There may be such extension, but none I'm aware of. But, IPB does have a button where you click and it shows the first/last posts which expands. Not exactly what you asked, but very close.

3. Personally speaking, GoDaddy has too many scam-like services and scam-like operations. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend Godaddy. But beyond that, it shouldn't have any problem with IPB. I also don't think there's any IPB authorized third party domain sellers. I personally like namecheap. Nice clean interface without 100s of ads in your face. Or cold calls to your house... godaddy used to call me... >.>

I actually do have an IRC already. But due to the nature of the IRC, the overhead from repeated connect and unclean-disconnect will very easily crash the server. And with large # of users, you've virtually done a distributed syn attack.

Which... is why I asked the question #2. The implementation itself is something I can take care of, the problem is that, will such type of action be a burden far too great on the server.